HP 3585B Spectrum AnalyzerGPIB Software

I've written a program to capture screen images from an HP 3585B spectrum
analyzer (an 80s vintage beast that covers from 20Hz to 40MHz). I also
wrote a simple control program that allows you to set most of the 3585B's
parameters such as center frequency, span, resolution bandwidth, and reference
level. These programs run under the Linux operating system using the
LinuxGpib driver and
interface library, and the perl programming language.

The screen capture software generates a PNG format graphics file that more
or less matches what you see on the screen, with a few extra features.
The most important addition is the ability to create a trace that is the
average of a number of sweeps; this makes up for the lack of a "video
average" mode in the analyzer. In addition, you can display the minimum
and maximum values as well as the average. Scroll down this page to see
some examples of these functions in action.

Finally, you can choose multiple colors for the trace, and force the output
image to be transparent. Used together, those features mean that you can
use Photoshop or the Gimp to "stack" several traces into a single image.
I don't currently have an example of that feature used with the 3585B, but
here is a stacked trace taken from an HP8569B
analyzer with similar software.

These programs are available at
ftp://ftp.febo.com/pub/n8ur_programs.
I'm not putting precise links here because the filenames are likely to
change for a while yet. You will need to download the "n8ur.pm" and
"hp3585b.pm" modules as well as the main program files.

Note: this software will not work with the "A" model of
the HP3585; its GPIB commands are very different from those in the "B" version.